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Sanctified by Grace

With Sanctified by Grace Kyle and I have in mind a vexing challenge for contemporary theology: the hyper-specialization of the academy which causes divisions unnatural to theology, such as between mind and heart, belief and action, dogmatics and spirituality, etc. Spirituality, the Christian life and Christian practice are all relegated to other disciplines and no longer flow from and speak back (prophetically) into theology. Rather than recognizing the death of spirituality when it is divorced from theology (and vice versa), the modern academy baptizes this separation with academic programs and books in which theology and spirituality rarely collide (let alone mutually influence).

In a modest way we hope the book addresses these temptations by providing a theological account of the Christian life in which doctrine and life, confession and practice are held together in the divine economy of grace. The approach is straightforwardly doctrinal – focusing the life of the Christian on the triune God who creates, elects, calls and redeems.

Though we did not edit the book specifically for classrooms (a publishing practice I sometimes despair over), we nonetheless hoped it will be a natural fit for courses in Systematic Theology, Practical theology, Spiritual theology, and those more narrowly focused on Ecclesiology or the Christian Life (such as the one I teach at HU).

We promised some excerpts from our forthcoming book, Sanctified by Grace: A Theology of the Christian Life, so here we go. An obvious question is simply what we mean by the construction “the Christian life.” To what does it refer, what is its range of meaning, and from where does one draw to fill out its content? This is taken from the Introduction:

‘The Christian life’ is theological shorthand for redeemed human existence in communion with the triune God through union with Christ in the Spirit. That is, it names the temporal experience of God’s eternal purposes for fellowship as they are realized in human beings according to God’s grace. To state it yet another way, to address ‘the Christian life’ is to speak about the character of reconciled and renewed human existence. God’s gracious purpose to conform fallen people to the image of Christ takes shape and fulfills itself in time and space; this is the Christian life.

Putting it this way points out the rich doctrinal nexus within which the doctrine of the Christian life is situated. While the primary reference of ‘the Christian life’ is the lived experience of Christian identity, as a doctrinal locus it stands dogmatically related to other areas of Christian witness such as the doctrines of the Trinity, creation and providence, Christ, the church and the final consummation (to name a few). Being so related, the doctrine of the Christian life is informed and illumined by a whole series of theological claims about God, such as his relation to created reality, his reconciling works and the human activities which arise from them. In turn, those other doctrines are likewise informed and illumined through the doctrine of the Christian life. Our approach thus articulates a theology of the Christian life in terms of the whole of the Christian confession rather than just one dimension.